Beach sunsets and golf get the headlines. The real reason to buy on the Grand Strand right now is happening in factories, ports, and tax filings across the state. South Carolina Economy Good For Home Buyers
Quick answer: South Carolina is currently one of the fastest-growing state economies in the country, anchored by billions in automotive and energy manufacturing investment (BMW, Scout Motors, GE Vernova) plus a Horry County tax base propped up by 17.8 million annual tourists rather than resident property taxes. Together, that combination supports population growth, housing demand, and long-term price stability for buyers along the Myrtle Beach coast.
South Carolina’s New Automotive Corridor
Two names are doing most of the heavy lifting in South Carolina’s manufacturing story right now: BMW and Scout Motors.
BMW has just wrapped a $1.7 billion investment across its Spartanburg campus and its newer Plant Woodruff facility. Spartanburg was already BMW’s largest production plant on earth, having built more than 412,000 X-Series SUVs in 2025 alone — and it’s about to add another milestone: the all-electric BMW iX5 will be the first fully electric BMW ever assembled in the United States, with production starting late 2026. Seeing the next generation of these SUVs in person on a recent trip to BMW’s German headquarters made it hit differently, knowing those exact vehicles will soon be built less than two hours from the Grand Strand.
Scout Motors is the other half of the story — an entirely new American brand being built from scratch in Blythewood, just outside Columbia. The electric truck and SUV maker is putting roughly $2 billion into its South Carolina plant, targeting more than 4,000 permanent jobs and eventual production above 200,000 vehicles a year, with output expected by the end of 2026.
Between the two, South Carolina is fast becoming a serious hub for both traditional and electric SUV manufacturing — exactly the kind of durable, high-wage industrial base that drives migration and housing demand statewide, coastal markets included.
Energy Manufacturing: GE Vernova’s Greenville Expansion
The industrial momentum isn’t limited to cars. In Greenville, GE Vernova — GE’s energy-focused spinoff — is investing more than $160 million to expand gas turbine manufacturing at a facility that’s been building turbines since 1968. The expansion is projected to add more than 650 engineering and factory jobs, and GE Vernova leadership has framed it as central to keeping Greenville “the world’s center of gas turbine manufacturing,” supplying grid infrastructure both domestically and globally.
That matters well past Greenville’s city limits. As demand for electricity and grid capacity keeps climbing nationally — driven heavily by data centers and electrification — South Carolina is positioning itself as a supplier to that demand rather than just another consumer of it.
Why the Grand Strand Stayed Off the Warehouse and Data-Center Map (On Purpose)
Look at a map of South Carolina’s logistics and data-center growth and one thing jumps out: almost none of it touches Myrtle Beach. That’s not a missed opportunity — it’s geography doing exactly what it should.
Warehouse and distribution activity in South Carolina clusters along the I-95 corridor near Florence and Dillon, and around the ports of Charleston and Georgetown, because that’s where interstate access, rail, and port connectivity all meet. Myrtle Beach sits off the interstate grid on a peninsula built around tourism and residential life, not eighteen-wheelers and industrial parks — a feature for homeowners buying into this market, not a gap in the local economy.
The same holds for large-scale data centers, a major growth story elsewhere in the Southeast. You won’t find hyperscale data campuses drawing down power and water in Myrtle Beach. Yet the area still plays a genuinely important role in national digital infrastructure: it’s one of the few landing points on the entire U.S. East Coast for transatlantic undersea fiber cables. DC BLOX’s cable landing station here connects subsea cables running directly to Europe, chosen specifically for its position between existing landings in Florida and Virginia and its access inland to the Southeast’s fast-growing data center corridor. South Carolina Economy Good For Home Buyers
How Tourism Keeps Horry County’s Tax Base Healthy — Without Leaning on Homeowners
This is the piece that matters most to anyone actually buying property here: Horry County doesn’t need escalating property taxes to fund itself, because tourism is already doing that job.
In 2025, 17.8 million visitors spent $13.3 billion directly in the Myrtle Beach area, with total economic impact — direct, indirect, and induced spending combined — topping $26 billion. Horry County’s hospitality fee alone brought in roughly $59.3 million in 2024, and local accommodations taxes added more than $31 million, close to a third of every dollar of accommodations tax collected statewide. Visitor spending drives nearly 60% of all county sales tax revenue, and a dedicated penny sales tax funded largely by tourists helps support local schools and infrastructure.
Translation for buyers: every beach season and every golf season, millions of visitors are effectively subsidizing the schools, roads, and public safety that homeowners rely on year-round, while keeping more than 82,000 people employed locally in mostly year-round jobs. That’s a tax base built on tourism dollars, not rising property assessments on the homes you and your neighbors own.
A Wealth Signal Most Buyers Never Think to Check: Private Jet Traffic
One indicator worth watching closely is private aviation activity at the Grand Strand’s three general aviation airports — Myrtle Beach International, Grand Strand Airport in North Myrtle Beach, and Georgetown County Airport near Pawleys Island. Ongoing tracking of private jet traffic at these three FBOs points to strong and growing ultra-high-net-worth presence along the Myrtle Beach and Pawleys Island coastline. That kind of activity tends to lead the market rather than trail it — it shows up in flight logs well before it shows up in closed sale prices, and it signals sustained high-end demand along this stretch of coast.
What This Adds Up to for Buyers
Put the pieces together and the Grand Strand isn’t just riding South Carolina’s economic wave — it’s benefiting from it while staying insulated from the parts of that growth (heavy industry, warehousing, data-center power draw) that can strain a residential market elsewhere. Buyers get the upside of a state adding manufacturing jobs, energy investment, and population growth, paired with a local tax structure propped up by tourism instead of homeowners, and a luxury market along Myrtle Beach and Pawleys Island with real, verifiable staying power. South Carolina Economy Good For Home Buyers
If you want to talk through what any of this means for your own buying or selling timeline on the Grand Strand, or want to see what’s currently available on the market, reach out anytime.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is South Carolina’s economy relevant to Myrtle Beach home values?
Statewide manufacturing and energy investment (BMW, Scout Motors, GE Vernova) drive population growth and in-state migration, which supports long-term housing demand along the coast even though that heavy industry itself isn’t located in Myrtle Beach.
Does Myrtle Beach have warehouses or data centers?
Large-scale warehousing and hyperscale data centers are concentrated along the I-95 corridor and near the ports of Charleston and Georgetown, not in Myrtle Beach. The area’s one major digital-infrastructure role is as a transatlantic fiber cable landing point.
How does tourism affect Horry County property taxes?
Visitor spending accounts for close to 60% of county sales tax revenue and funds a large share of local hospitality and accommodations tax collections, reducing the need to fund public services through rising property assessments on homeowners. South Carolina Economy Good For Home Buyers
Phil Riola | Real Brokerage Inc. & Phil Riola Homes
📞 Cell: 610-428-6730
✉️ homes@philriola.com